om she regards at
once as the strongest and most helpless of human figures. She regards
him in some strange fashion at once as a warrior who must make his way
and as an infant who is sure to lose his way. The man has emotions which
exactly correspond; sometimes looking down at his wife and sometimes up
at her; for marriage is like a splendid game of see-saw. Whatever else
it is, it is not comradeship. This living, ancestral bond (not of love
or fear, but strictly of marriage) has been twice expressed splendidly
in literature. The man's incurable sense of the mother in his lawful
wife was uttered by Browning in one of his two or three truly shattering
lines of genius, when he makes the execrable Guido fall back finally
upon the fact of marriage and the wife whom he has trodden like mire:

"Christ! Maria! God,
Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"

And the woman's witness to the same fact has been best expressed by
Bernard Shaw in this great scene where she remains with the great
stalwart successful public man because he is really too little to run
alone.

There are one or two errors in the play; and they are all due to the
primary error of despising the mental attitude of romance, which is the
only key to real human conduct. For instance, the love making of the
young poet is all wrong. He is supposed to be a romantic and amorous
boy; and therefore the dramatist tries to make him talk turgidly, about
seeking for "an archangel with purple wings" who shall be worthy of his
lady. But a lad in love would never talk in this mock heroic style;
there is no period at which the young male is more sensitive and serious
and afraid of looking a fool. This is a blunder; but there is another
much bigger and blacker. It is completely and disastrously false to the
whole nature of falling in love to make the young Eugene complain of the
cruelty which makes Candida defile her fair hands with domestic duties.
No boy in love with a beautiful woman would ever feel disgusted when she
peeled potatoes or trimmed lamps. He would like her to be domestic. He
would simply feel that the potatoes had become poetical and the lamps
gained an extra light. This may be irrational; but we are not talking of
rationality, but of the psychology of first love. It may be very unfair
to women that the toil and triviality of potato peeling should be seen
through a glamour of romance; but the glamour is quite as certain a fact
as the p